Comment by pfdietz
19 hours ago
Games like SimCity just embody the assumptions that are designed into them, and there's no reason to think the designer was any more prescient than anyone else.
After all, if they could predict the future, why did they design a game rather than get rich in the stock market?
The user probably isn't suggesting the designers of SimCity are prescient; it's just that the assumptions that are designed into these games are clear reflections of the social perspective at the time. Assumptions like these tend to have inertia through time, and the user is likely just pointing out their surprise at the change.
I am not saying that SimCity predicts the future, rather I had assumptions growing up in that period, probably similar to everyone else at the time, that Nuclear and Fusion were the future of energy. It is cool to see that shift so soundly to solar in just two decades.
It's useful to go back and figure out why you believed that. Treat it as debugging your thinking. Others were saying, even back then, that nuclear and fusion had predictable economic problems.
SimCity 2000 with Fusion plants was released in 1993. To predict that solar would do this back then is asking a lot - this graph doesn't even start in 1993:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
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They predicted they had a better chance of getting rich off the game as opposed to the stock market